He has published fine books on the raven, and on the honeybee, and on a dozen other subjects. He's the sort of naturalist who seems an expert on most everything in the natural world, fully confident in his abilities and judgment, while at the same time modest, and slightly amused by, his, and all human, limitations.

The sort of naturalist, in other words, who, when describing a tiff with his siblings over his mother's estate, will say "the difference between what can happen to a human and to a naked mole rat family is mainly one of terminology."

He's expert with a pen, too. "The Homing Instinct: Meaning & Mystery in Animal Migration" (Houghton Mifflin, 368 pp., $27), Heinrich's latest, is an enchanting disquisition on many things, involving many different biological disciplines, relating to homing – "the orienting and ability to return to our own good place if we are displaced from it."

The subtitle is appropriate because humans, who form a good part of the subject of the book, are, after all, animals ("innate homebodies," we get lost easily, he says). But that subtitle is not quite complete, in that Heinrich even discusses what appears to be homing (or at least migrational) behavior in plants (chestnuts) as well.

The book is full of astounding animal feats, many of which you read about when you were a child but have since forgotten. They still boggle the mind, and a book review should be permitted at least one: Each wandering albatross parent will fly up to 1,500 kilometers over ocean – ocean that appears to humans bleak and featureless – to find food for their chick; having gathered a full crop of squid, each then flies back to its nest, on a small, remote islet, in a straight line: "It knows where it is at all times," says Heinrich.

Homes, for Heinrich's purposes, need not be nests, caves, houses or hives. Some homes are "to the herd," as he calls it – schools of fish and, in the 19th century, flocks of passenger pigeons.

It is delightful that Heinrich is not afraid of the word anthropomorphism – "a pejorative term," he says, "that has been used for the purpose of separating us from the rest of life."

That attitude allows him to posit what seems at once perfectly sensible and perfectly strange – that certain animal behavior is driven by emotion. For example, the flight of the bat-tailed godwit from Alaska to Australia, without stopping, eating or drinking, and using up all of its fat, muscle and body stores except its brain, cannot be explained in terms of logic, Heinrich says, but rather in terms of an emotion, love – the love of home. What a pleasing notion.

Mercifully – and, in this day and age, surprisingly in a discussion of the natural world – the book is mostly free of global-warming hectoring.

In any event, there is enough human insanity to worry about. In another piece of mind-boggling information, this time not the good kind, Heinrich reports that scientists are working on robot bees to pollinate genetically modified plants. The robobees would be immune to the heavy doses of herbicides and pesticides, applied to GM crops, that kill Mother Nature's bees.

"The Homing Instinct" is marvelous, both for the knowledge it imparts and because it points out, as well, what we don't know. In regard to some behaviors, Heinrich says, "there is more going on than we understand." Or: "we have learned much, but it has left us with the mysterious, magical, and miraculous."

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